Mise en scène is a French term that refers to what is put into a scene or frame, it constitutes the visual information in from of the camera: is able to communicate essential information to the audience. As mentioned in the post of week 1, the Mise en scène is made up of various elements which all contribute lead the viewer in the right direction.
Gestures and poses of a character can add on to what we want to communicate: narrative is driven by the character. A Character doesn’t even really have to move to to maybe communicate an emotion or a state of mind. The features of a character are extremely important: from the way a character is designed, we can feel empathy with it, there are certain elements in its structure such as big eyes or mouth that have a strong power of communication making a character appealing too (babies and puppies have big eyes). But we could also have an affiliation with evil characters finding hope in them. The Gestures are how we express ideas or feelings through the body; creating natural gestures makes our characters feel believable. The line of action of a character dictates the intention of the action: most of the time it is necessary to break the rules of physics a little bit to to make it look right and readable.
“Good examples” of animation -Focus on the practice of animation not the film/story. For example, does the character move incorrectly or unappealingly. Is the design aesthetic and performance of the character ‘odd/strange’ –
Walt Disney “Fantasia” (1940)
“Dance of the Hours“, showing the dance of the Hippos and the Alligators”
The characters seem weightless, the animators adjusted the physics of their action to their need: the hippos had to be elegant and classy as if they were real-life ballerinas. Their movement is harmonious and appealing, there is no dialogue but the personality and emotions of the dancers are clear to the audience.
“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”
These two extracts from this classic masterpiece effectively depicts the use of visuals and music merged together to create a unique experience, where the storytelling “speaks” its emotions by itself addressing directly to the audience building a dialogue with them as well.
“The cooking scene” from “Ratatouille” (2007)
This particular action of the film is the first where we actually see Remi, the main character, cooking. The secondary actions in this scene, and throughout the whole movie, for ears and tale are the fine touch to make the character coherent. Moreover, the audience can also perceive the effort of how he manages to cook in a non-animal cooking environment where everything is bigger and different to reach and the. The body weight seems to increasingly loose its realistic effects with the crescendo of the intensity of the scene when he is inspired to cook something, for example when he jumps over the saucepan to put the ingredients inside. Moreover also in this extract music and action are perfectly merged and create a totally immersive atmosphere.
Merida archery scene – Brave
The realism obtained for the hair movements of this character throughout the whole movie (following the secondary action principle) constitutes a perfect example of seamless accuracy applied to animation. Also the cinematic effects when the young princess throws the bow are highly realistic and freeze the movement of the arrow yet maintaining a complete feeling of dynamism.
“Bad examples” of animation
Reference footage is usually filmed for most animated movies to give the animators a sense of what the characters should look/move like in general and for anatomy and positioning purposes but directly tracing over footage for most people in the industry would not be the right choice.
“Anastasia” (1997) the “real princess” scene
Most animation of this movie was rotoscoped (live action reference footage was filmed and the animators just directly traced over the person and their movement) which can look a little disturbing compared to what people are usually familiar: it generally doesn’t have the stylised, squash and stretch style of animation that everyone is used to and tends to be more fluid.
“Pinocchio” (1940) scene “Am I a real boy?”
If we compare the Blue Fairy (who was rotoscoped) to Pinocchio (who wasn’t), there’s a huge difference in the way they both were animated: If you look at the Fairy’s wings they move and bend like the plastic ones: in the reference footage the actress must have been wearing stiff rather than something more fitting and cartoonish.
It is difficult to develop a cohesive storyline but there are some definite rules that directors follow that may help, since that a consideration should be applied to put together a narrative in order for it to communicate.
A narrative is defined by the following rules:
A successful narrative must competently handle a medium to present a claim of events that engage an audience and satisfactorily conclude. A story is a chain of events that comes to a conclusion, able to make some rational understanding of what is happening overall.
All character-based narrative require the actors to have appeal and to perform convincingly in the role. Actors and characters should be able to extract their potential communication (for characters, animators are in charge).
It stipulates that the directors create the appeal and that they extract the potential performance of the actors to communicate the story.
Directors can make innovative films by taking the rules to the limit, since is quite difficult to completely break them; they can alter things and change the structure of the classic narrative.
The structure of narrative itself comes from Aristotle’s Poetics. In 350 BCE, Aristotle wrote that the plot structure of a drama is formed like a basic triangle:
Ethos is about establishing your authority to speak on the subject.
Logos is your logical argument for your point.
Pathos is your attempt to sway an audience emotionally.
Our traditional three acts come from this triangle.
Basic structure of a narrative
Beginning (Exposition, something to overcome or a goal)
Middle (Rising action, Climax)
End (Falling action, Denouement)
However, the need for a more detailed structure was necessary since plots become more intricate. Gustav Freytag, a German playwright and novelist, wrote a book called Die Technik des Dramas. In it, he put forth the five-act dramatic structure.
5 Acts structure structure of a narrative (more detailed)
Act 1: the exposition for the audience
Act 2: rising action, conflicts appear
Act 3: the climax, the problem get worse
Act 4: falling action, everything’s downhill
Act 5: denouement or resolution
Giving the previous structure, how can directors avoid the predictable element? by altering, shifting and manipulating the elements of the structure: for instance after a temporary resolution there could be a reappearing complication. Once all the the key elements are there, there are potential to start at different point in the film.
Talking about innovation in narrative Animation, even though it does share conventions (Disney Hyperrealism which is the use of normal cinema in animation or conventional cinema in animation), but it does have its own potentials such as metamorphosis which has symbolism, metaphors: somehow animation allows us to explore animation in avery different way compared to live action.
This animation encaptures the principles of Animation: slow in & slow out in the peaks, squash & stretch when the ball performs, the arcs which help visualise the movement, timing and spacing which determines the numbers of frames you are animating on and it differs depending on the spacing and the distribution of the keyframes. Moreover the bouncing ball rhythm can appear in other areas such as character walks (when the character goes up and down as it walks) or when it runs down the stairs. It can be used to test an animator animation skills.
Two famous versions and interpretations of the bouncing ball animation are:
Preston Blair Bouncing ball, which appears to have more “inner life”.
Richard Williams Bouncing ball, which compared to the previous one, has an extra pose leading to a more fluid animation.
In order to recreate an “illusion of life”, the Decay (dissipation) of energy & momentum over time are elements to be considered when animation, since the ball will eventually comes to rest on the floor after the several bounces and the consequent lost of energy.
These are the aspects of the bouncing ball decay animation to keep in mind in order to imitate the physics of the real world:
Decay of height (bounce) – approximately 1/4 to1/5 each bounce.
Decay of spacing (time) – the frames get less and less each bounce (one less each time).
Rotation – which is the spin of the ball.
Squash & stretch (scale) – in each peak it gets less and less.
Trajectory and reaction angle – contact with the surface it bounces on.
There can be two approaches to this type of animation:
Uneven bounce (e.g. 9 | 8 frame distance) – typical of a cartoonish approach, looking more alive.
Even bounce (e.g. 9 | 9 frame distance) – which resembles more real physics, looking more passive.
The Trajectory is a really important element which helps animators flow the Arcs of the movement. Is influenced by the materiality and complexity of the ball and the surroundings. The Materiality refers to the different ball type (material) which leads to a different dissipation and also to different surfaces leading to a different reaction. In other words it deal with the third law of motion: the law of action and reaction.
Here follows a practical example of the Bouncing Ball with Travel animation and its process:
The ball rig:
The question mark groups all the preferences for the ball: the moment of the ball (the cycle that splits it in two), squash and stretch controls (at the top), the “antennas” which add an angle the morph of the ball (at the top), start position control (to add real effect).
The ball bonces with an even bounce approach:
The approach to animation is to work on different levels considering the complexity of the rig which is actually helping the animator making easier to save different keys while animating. Throughout the animation the most important tools to help create it were: timeline (a window into the overall animation of the scene) , graph editor (graphic representation of the animation), and keyframes (keys, a marker used to specify an object’s position and attributes at a given point in time).
The first aspect to consider is the “positioning” of the ball, the different locations where the ball will be throughout the animation (translate y, hight, and z, length), for this reason there should be only the positioning controls: the fist axis to work on is the “y”. Once the keys are saved, in the graphic editor the tangents should be broken to help create nice curves to achieve good arcs. The bounces should be 1/5 less each time it bounces with 1 frame less between peaks each time.
Secondly, the ball is made travel across the scene using the “z” axis: with the help of an editable motion trail the ball now bounces forward. In the graphic editor linear curves have to be created to take away the energy in the ball, otherwise it seems like it is hooping.
After that the squash and stretch controls are switched on again with the angle controls too: the angle should be parallel to z and perpendicular to y when it reacher the peaks in the air and the other way around when it reaches the peaks on the ground: so that only one control is used to squash and stretch the ball. 90 degrees each time are added in the “rotate x” by adding ). The squash and stretch is created and dissipated each time it bounces.
Next step is rotation: the ball rotation when it bounces it should be approximately 180 degrees rotation per each bounce. After in the graphic editor the curve on the graphic is adjusted to create a natural rotation.
Afterwards a slight slide is added at the end of the bounce since it had lost energy, which adds a real factor to the animation.
the last step is to choose a “messy” starting pose for the first frame to add a natural effect.
Final animation:
Challenge 2: Bouncing Ball Obstacle Course
Next task will be to build an obstacle course and animate a bouncing ball navigating its way through it. For this particular animation a “cartoon physics” world inspired the bouncing ball animation dynamic.
I have started with planning the animation by creating a visual process in 2D using Procreate, an app which has an Animation assist option to easily create frames to draw in with options such as choosing the frames per second (24) and picking the onion skin opacity to follow the movement. As showed in the animation below, the ball bounces the first time with much more energy and in the next three bounces the energy decays (following the third law of motion). The last part involves the ball, after the last bounce rolling down toward the semicircle acquiring more energy while rolling to one end but dissipating its energy as the rolling progresses back and force until eventually coming to rest in the middle of the semicircle.
When first saving the keys I have opted for an uneven bounce approach, since that is typical of a cartoonish approach, in which the ball looks more alive. The process I have employed is the following:
I have worked on the movement and positioning of the ball making its way through the obstacle; so I switched off the other control leaving the position control on and saved the keys for both the”y” and “z” axis helping with the motion trail to visualise the movement. Once the main keyframes where positioned and some in-betweens were created, I have worked on the graphic editor curves since the arcs of the movement where not completely defined.
The graphic editor was very useful in this process: following the motion trail I broke the tangents of the “translate y” to create nicer curves and spline the “translate z” in the editor to make a more natural feel to the animation.
After the movement positions where sorted, I edited the angle controls for the squash and stretch controls to so that the angle of the ball followed the arc of the movement. Moreover, when the ball bounces the two controls alternate throughout the animation allowing me to just use one of the to squash the ball. I then used the squash and stretch controls and edit them according to the bounces and the decay of energy of the ball (adjusting the angle too): the first bounce when the ball jump on the surface will be the one with more squash and this energy is going to dissipate over time. Just after the last bounce when it fall over the rotating surface, the ball would loose some energy but acquire a bit more as it roles over the semicircle: so I added a slight squash which get less and less with the rolling of the ball until it stops.
As the ball proceeds into the obstacle it rotates. The next step was the rotation, I first set the first and last keys in the animation where the rotation was zero. After I set a second keyframe when it bounces the first time to use it as frame of reference to locate the last keyframe on the graphic editor. The last step was to add more rotation for the last few frames when the ball roles on the semicircle: it first roles onward, then it reaches the peak, then it roles backward and onward again and so forth until it comes to a rest. (In the first attempt I made for the last rotation animation I made the mistake of inverting the direction of the rolling, but eventually I figured that out and fixed it).
The last part of the process was to check the overall animation and finessing everything. To add a more natural effect I edited the first position of the ball so that the overall movement throughout the animation would result less calculated.
This is the last result:
The first render using playblast.
After I actually polished the motion track since that some cur verve were not exactly smooth with defined arcs.
This is the last rendered video which I first rendered with bach render adding a skydive and direct lightingn and after I merged the output images in a sequence in After effects.
Anyone that deals with animation as at least once heard about this principles: they are the building blocks of animation and since they are very versatile they have different application as well. However, paradoxically they can lead to a lack of creativity if followed to much. They can be found in the book “Illusion of Life” (1981) by Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston, two of the most influential animators at Walt Disney Animation; they had an important role in the production of Disney’s classics such as Pinocchio, Bambi, and Fantasia and Snow White in what is often referred as “The Golden era of Animation”. The principles are:
Squash and stretch: determines how cartoonish or naturalistic the character animation is: the more squashed and stretched a character is the more cartoonish it will animate.
Anticipation: before moving into a direction it’s better to create an anticipation, the pose before the main action. It gives the audience time to read the action.
Staging: a correct staging is able to communicate the character and story elements.
Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose: are two different approaches to animation. the straight ahead is the method where animators create poses in sequence, while in the pose to pose the first and the last keys are created and then the intermediate keys are blocked in and after the breakdowns which might be a more controlled process but it can lead to a stiffer animation.
Follow Through and Overlapping Action: part of the character or subject moves at a different rate because they have different weight and different properties
Slow in and Slow Out: an object or a character in animation start their movements out more slowly, then picks up speed and finishes with deceleration.
Arcs: this principle has different meanings. It could refer to the structure of a character or the result of when it moves around. A clean arcs leads to an appealing animation. Arcs are involved in may aspects like performance (motion) or in details (hands or feet or head), or at the roots of a character.
Secondary Action: is anything responding to the primary action which is the body and the character or anything active in the scene.
Timing & Spacing: timing is the frame numbers assigned to the keys of the actions determining how an action is fast or slow while spacing refers to the position of the in between and breakdowns frames between the first and last frames, the extremes. In 3D animation a visual representation of this principle is in the Graphic Editor.
Terminology:
keys – main pose.
extreme – in-betweens.
breakdowns- details.
Exaggeration: it pushes an animation or a pose beyond its logic limits.
Solid Drawing: makes the drawing looks three dimensional and believable with volume, weight and balance.
Appeal : it is referring more with charisma or charm rather than the aesthetic itself. It deals with the visual experience, so it can also concern the design in correlation with the movement and the personality.
They apply physical laws of motion for the sake of animation: they offer drawn characters the ability to move and act, but they fall short of meeting the interactive motion requirements of modern user interfaces: they were first formulated from the 2D experience when 3D Animation of modern age was not even conceived. Many animators throughout the years tried to build from this list adjusting it to their needs and observations: an example is Dermot O’ Connor’s “21 Foundations of Animation” which can be applied to digital animation. Some of this new principles are the following:
Strong Design: crucial when using simple geometries as a starting point for character designs.
Acting and pantomime: a character is able to express its personality and emotions mutely by gestures.
Keys and breakdowns: keys are the main poses in a scene, establishing the most important actions and emotions the breakdown loosen up the motions between the scene creating vitality in the movement.
Silhouette: able to communicate character’s emotions and actions.
Counterpose: the rotation of the hips and shoulders relatives to one another (important in walk cycle).
Animation in relation to Physics an application of the principles
We can distinguish three main approaches to the laws of physics depending on the filmography we are dealing with:
Movie physics: the physics applied to the animation here changes in relation to the narrative choice of the director and the storytelling: sci-fi and fantasy movies tend to push reality physics more.
Cartoon physics: even though the animation seems not to follow the common physics laws, cartoons has an inherent logic that dictates the physics rules of that world and can be used as a source of comedy such as gravity which can be turned on and off when it is the right comic moment.
The principles of animation are the result of an accurate observation of the real world physics and a well animated film is the output of these observations.
The animation principles guide us when we make technique and performance choices in our work. They should be considered as guidelines for creating an appealing animation engaging and fine to watch. The following is a general overview of the principles and their meaning.
Squash ans stretch
Is considered to be the most important principle since is capable of giving characters and objects a sense of flexibility and life. This principle ca be applied to object squishing into something but a they move and deform their volume stays the same such as the saucing ball animation in week 1. However this principle may be used it helps adding to the illusion of life.
Anticipation
It helps preparing the character and the audience for the action: it often means moving the character a small amount in the opposite direction to that of the main action. Is a useful tool in fine-tuning performance choices. This principle can stress the difference between a thinking, planning and intelligent character and a character simply reacting to the world around him.
Staging
This comprehend a big area including framing the camera to best capture the action to plan the animation to best communicate the motion, the character arc, the story. It helps to create the scene. In order to start, finding reference videos or photos of the animation can give cues to the beginning of the work. During this phase, staging means how to plan the poses and layout of the scene are going to show the motion. While programming the scene is key maintaining a high level of communication throughout the shot: thinking about the entire action, adjusting the camera, finding the right balance in the composition of the scene, all these elements can improve the staging of the scene. When the animation stage is finished, is important to establish where the audience’s eyes are going to be looking throughout the shot. Some decisions to influence this are: lighting, effects, and editing.
Straight ahead/ Pose to pose
This two principles describe the two basic approaches to blocking in a piece of animation. Straight ahead: animation creates the base animation by posing the animation by posing the animation in a frame, then moving forward one or more frames and posing again.
Pose to pose: animators create the key poses and after create the key poses and after create other poses in between those poses.
They both have cons and pros.
Straight ahead should be used when the action is very mechanical or physical: the ability to perceive the motion as you frame through the animation in slow motion is better.
Pose to pose is for character performances: the key poses a character hits are going to tell the story since that without a strong sense of the characters body language the emotional story gets lost.
Overlapping action /Follow through
Overlap instills a fluidity to character animation. When added to the characters gestures, overlap makes the animation feel like the character has a natural flexible quality: it has a major impact on the performance of a character.
With follow-through an animator can show a sense of weight with the character : the heavier the weight, the more energy it will take to stop the character and using the follow through emphasise it. (offsetting the curves in the graph editor is a common trick)
Slow in and Slow out
It refers to the spacing of the keys when an action comes to a stop or changes direction or even when a character transition from pose to pose: this principle refers to the fact that we typically decelerate objects as they come to a stop rather than have them to come to a dead halt instantly (slow in) and also to gradually accelerate objects as they begin to move and not have them instantly be at full speed (slow out of a pose). The graph editor is a great way to visualise the principle through the curves and tangents. And a Motion Trail helps to edit the animation motion path in the scene in Maya.
Arcs
Most natural actions are following an arched path. It helps avoiding a linear path and mechanical, robotic performances: we should consider the whole body arc and track it to determine the forces of the body. However the Arc principle can also be applied to other elements on the animation since is scalable.
Secondary action
This principle can add a nice level of meaning to the whole scene. We are always occupying ourselves with more than one thing at a time and constantly multitasking. It can add life like elements to the scene: are actions that support the main action of a character or object. They are used to emphasize or accentuate the primary action, but they must be used carefully or they might take away from the main action.
Timing
Is the very foundation of animation: time is used to convey meaning in a scene other than accurately portray motion in realistic scenes since it helps the audience to emote with a character and it can be used to tell a deeper story by edit the time they make to happen.
Exaggeration
When the core idea in a scene is found there should be figure out the best way to exaggerate the message and strengthen it.
Solid drawing
the construction of a character involves simple shapes combined together with clean, meaningful lines. There should be taken in consideration the line of the action, the force of the pose and the weight of a character, perspective and a sense of the characters’ volume has to be consistent. In CGI Animation Maya is really helping in taking care of these aspects of the model: the animator should not distort the body or their face or even the rig (goes off-model), the body sections should be working together in harmony.
Appeal
All the principals combine together to make appeal which is the goal of animation. For instance Twinning is a major issue in posing since in nature nothing is ever perfectly symmetrical so creating an asymmetrical pose could generate more appeal. Or during staging this aspect should be well thought out, the silhouette of the pose should be strong, without limbs lost within the silhouette of the body.
Step by step workflow to employ when creating a shot from start to finish which could differ in size or time but can be broke down in the following way:
Thumbnail very pushed poses to the model;
the body movement should look good before facial animation;
the movement should be polished but before the reference should be used to compare the dynamic.
How does this ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’ sequence differ aesthetically from the rest of the film. Why do you think Disney might have included it?
In order to understand this scene we should put it into the context of the film itself: In the ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’ sequence, Dumbo and Timothy have dreams of Pink elephants from being drunk. It is a particularly sad moment for the elephant which can’t find his place and has just lost his family and when his friend notices that he has hiccups he suggest to drink some water which after reveals to be Champaign. The animation of the pink elephants is characterised by “metamorphosis” where continuity of the storytelling is archived by the association of images and colours: this technique allowed the animators to connect apparently unrelated images. In this case is a very useful tool to combine dreams, or hallucinations, with reality. The overall colours are very saturated and varied and the characters’ animations are particularly distorted and malleable which make it easier to transform them into shapes. This sequence stands out from the rest of the film for its very distinctive style and the lack of hyperrealism that characterises the other animations in the rest of scenes: the elephants floats in the air, they seems weightless, they are “full of impossible movements and fantastic visions” as Steven Schneider says; that is because this particular sequence was animated by animators from the East coast (who tended to emphasised artifice, nonlinear narrative just like Fleischer and Van Beuren did) who studied animation in New York. In the same film we can notice two different character designs for the elephants: the anthropomorphic Dumbo and the Pink Elephants who, other than having no eyes, they have a more “gothic” design, implying the strangeness of the scene. This scene, as uncorrelated as it might seem, leads actually to a crucial change in Dumbos life: he can use his ears to fly (because of the hallucinations he and his mouse friend had they found themselves the next morning on top of a tree).
Reference
the Guardian. 2021. Why I love … Dumbo’s pink elephants. [online] Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/16/why-i-love-dumbo-pink-elephants> [Accessed 18 October 2021].
How did cartoons such as Duck Amuck (Dir. Chuck Jones, 1953) differ from/or diverge from Disney realism and classical Hollywood cinema. Make a list. Consider things such as aesthetics, the sound, the performance of the characters, the style of animation and the ideology.
This episode was produced by Warner Bros and one of Chuck Jones’s greatest moments of his career. According to the director Chuck Jones, this film demonstrated for the first time that animation can create characters with a recognizable personality, independent of their appearance, milieu, or voice. However, characters in many Warner’s cartoons often seem to be trying to break out of the frame as they address the audience animator can do absolutely anything, absolutely easily. It treats and looks at the subject from a different perspective.
At the beginning, the first few seconds, actually do not show anything different is about to happen: there are even the initial credits which look like those at the beginning of the first disney films. But, after few seconds, as Duffy duck proceeds forward into the scene the drawing start to disappear leaving him without any environment to being animated in. He talks directly to the animator, breaking the borders between him and his creator wondering why there is no scenery: somehow is like he is talking to us, a possible interaction within the character and the audience since that at first we can only see the drawing tools. He then starts a numerous attempt to adjust to whatever the animator is creating, trying to fit it. The result is that whatever way the animator draws him like, which ever costume or props he has, his very distinctive personality comes across the same in each example. It definitely make use of the advantages of using animation rather then conventional filmmaking: to create life itself (when the animator erases Duffy or draws him differently) and create also fantastical things which diverge from the reality (especially in the last few seconds when the animator duplicates him or make the frame collapse over him). There is also an interesting aspect in the last scene: is actually bugs bunny who has been animating him so there is an animation within an animation which adds up to the unrealistic aspect of the context.
If we pay a closer attention to Disney productions over the years we notice a common structure from which each film develops their own story: it is “the hero’s journey” formulated by Joseph Campbell in the book “a hero with a thousand faces”. it can be perceived as a cycle that takes place in the universe in which the hero lives. All the key stages happen in a special world but he starts and finishes (transformed) in his ordinary world. Some could argue that Disney’s attention to detail tends to be more directed towards animation rather than the story: this led many figures in the past years to try and broke the rules of Disney.
Can you think of any animation studios/forms of animation/animators who have imitated or been influenced by Disney’s hyperreal animation aesthetic in their editing? How do they do this? Include animation in its myriad forms in your consideration of your answer.
There is always been the box office battle between Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks (even though ones can argue that the productions from the latter are more mature and deal with more introspective themes). We can spot similarly in a large number of films that they released around the same period. This is what happened in two film regarding stories set in South America: “The Road to El Dorado” (Dreamworks) and Emperor’s New Groove” (Disney), featuring an adventure comedy with a very similar narrative progression. Moreover, we can notice similarities between their animation styles and character concepts and design. In “The Road to El Dorado” the reference of Disney hyperrealism is easy to identify: the fictitious events and characters of the film are constructed to make the audience believe they are viewing events and characters that actually exist. The story was too derivative of the hall of fame of Disney Renaissance movies that came before it.
The following is a clip from the film:
Can you think of any any animation studios/forms of animation/animators who resist this aesthetic? How do they do this? Include animation in its myriad forms in your consideration of your answer.
On the other hand, some made a shift towards Disney’s production procedures and hyperrealism such as Studio Ghibli created in 1985 by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. The reason why their storytelling is so different from the Disney’s one is because is based on a different culture, the Japanese one: this way of telling a story is called “kishōtenketsu” (which characterised the fist Studio Ghibli’s films). Compared to the storytelling that western cultures are used to the kishōtenketsu includes long, quiet and introspective moments (often conceived as a window for the audience to be part of that particular passage) interrupted by a sudden change of events. This is method is often misinterpreted as a lack of action (relevant to the development of the film) or driving conflict. This method is the one we can find in works such as “My Neighbor Totoro”.
Editing is a fundamental aspect of filmmaking: it has the power of bringing together a group of shots and transform them into a complete film. Its process differs from what is that is being edited: in animation, for instance, the editing starts in the pre-production phase with Storyboards, since they have to be more careful of what to include in a shot.
Purposes:
Behind the editing of a film lies the whole narrative structure of a film it ensures that the action and therefore the narrative is clear and understandable, defines how the storytelling progresses. It is also a powerful tool to bring to the screen a symbolic language full of messages and cut away elements that are not relevant: the metamorphosis in particular is able to change an object into another one which can be perceived as a narrative itself.
3 Golden Rules:
it should be invisible to the eyes of the audience: the artificial part of the film should not be perceived
The storyteller should never let the audience get ahead of them – less is more.
The audience has to be a participant, not just a spectator.
The Alternative to an editing can be considered the “Long take” since the viewer gains the most obvious plot information from the shot but there is no cut occurring.
A type of editing is the montage which as the power to generate a shock or a new idea by bringing individual shots together (an examples the shower scene from Psyco)
An important method of editing is continuity editing: it creates a sense of flow. an example could be “river boat scene” from “the night fo the hunter” where characters are not in the same frame, but its obvious by the editing that they are chasing each other, however, the last three shots are able to change the scenario to prepare the audience for the next part of the story.
Editing make use of shot transitions to travel throughout space and time. Although the shot have to follow a certain path an inner logic, which is the continuity.
We can identify four different ways to archive continuity:
Graphic relations between shots: any element of the mist-en-scène can create a graphic continuity or a graphic contrast. e.g. “hallelujah scene” Shrek (2001): nobody is in the right place and all in different locations and that is represented by the graphic matches between the elements in each character’s environment.
Rhythmic relations between shots: A shot can vary in its duration and the duration of shots alters their rhythmic succession: it has the power to add suspense to a scene and tension (“the Birds” – Hitchcock (1963). A steady rhythm is achieved with shots of the same length, on the contrary shots that differ in length create an irregular rhythm.
Spatial relations between shots: used to situate the narrative in a space: shots are taken from different camera positions and edited together to recreate the whole space. E.g. Psycho first scene: the sounds and images together make the audience understand that something is off and the sequence communicates a sense of remoteness of the place where the car is headed to. It can be archived through the 180 degree rule. Spacial continuity can be maintained with match cuts (math on action and eyeliner match).
Temporal relations between shots: the order, the duration, the frequency of events can be controlled by editing. Plots may not be chronological: flashback (analepsis) cuts to an earlier story and then returns to the present; flashforward (prolepsis) cuts to a future story event that has not yet occurred chronologically, then returns to the present. There are inventive ways to deal with these. Woody Allen in “Annie Hall” (1977) avoids analysis by using a split screen so that the chronology of events is not interrupted. Editing can distort time (“Batman Begins” the journey that the character takes only take three minutes but it is perceived as much longer).
Screen direction is an important aspect of continuity editing: is the direction that actors or objects appear to be moving on the screen from the point of view of the camera and of the audience; so the movement of the camera is governed by the rules of screen direction. Following the screen direction means that once is achieved it has to maintain consistency in order to avoid audience confusion. Some tools to maintain screen continuity are:axis of action, imaginary lines and the 180 degree rule. the imaginary line can be crossed if any of the actors are seen changing screen direction within a shot. (e.g. neutral shot: subjects move directly towards or away the camera, so the sense of direction is neutral).
Disney Hyperrealism
Paul Wells described it as “a mode of animation which, despite the medium ‘s artifice, strives for realism”. This artistic paradigm is a sort of parameter which people take from or break (e.g. Fleischer, America East coast animators). During the early stages of Disney, believability rather than absolute realiswbacame the driving principle: they took conventional filmmaking and imposed it into their filmmaking.
